From white potatoes to Pacific salmon and even cigars, the nearly three-hour meeting had a bit of everything. And behind the scenes, first lady Michelle Obama pushed — with some success — for last-day compromises protecting nutrition standards for children.

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For Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), it was a rockier start than she might have hoped given the need for GOP support to move the annual spending bills across the Senate floor this summer.

But the budget disputes with her ranking Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, pale next to the battles of the past four years. And after their early sparring, Shelby and Mikulski joined in support of the two underlying bills funding the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.

Indeed, Thursday’s meeting represented an early start for the committee and Mikulski laid out an ambitious schedule of drafting all of the 12 annual bills by early July. It seems very unlikely that the full Senate will move this fast on the floor. But both the VA and agriculture measures could be used down the road to expedite larger deals encompassing other appropriations as well.

Both Mikulski and her House counterpart, Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), are obliged under the December agreement to hold discretionary spending to $1.014 trillion for the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

But within this framework, she is taking more license to try to deal with emergency costs as well as a major $4.3 billion scoring dispute between the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

For example, Mikulski frees up $2.7 billion in domestic money by assuming more of the State Department’s budget will be paid for from overseas contingency funds — not counted under the budget caps and previously assigned to the Pentagon.

Like the White House, she assumes that Congress will enact legislation — backed by many Western Republicans — that will allow her to treat up to $1.2 billion in future wildland firefighting costs as emergency disaster funding. And her allocation for the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services anticipates that more than $2 billion in additional savings can be found by making legislative changes to entitlement programs funded in the same bill.

Those savings are needed because of a burgeoning crisis along the southern border of the U.S. that continues to see an increased number of children and teenagers — unaccompanied by an adult — coming across from Mexico and Central America.

“I didn’t invent new money and I did not invent new tools,” Mikulski said in defense of her approach. But Shelby complained that some of her methods were “questionable” and all 14 Republicans opposed the chairwoman on the 16-14 roll call approving her plan.

In the case of the $20.6 billion budget for agriculture and food safety, most of the committee debate focused on nutrition standards — a major agenda plank for the first lady.

As voted Thursday, white potatoes — not as chips or fries — would qualify for the first time as part of the WIC supplemental nutrition program geared to pregnant women and their young children. But the same amendment, engineered by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), gives the administration the ability to pull potatoes back out if a mandated study recommends that they not be included.

In a second skirmish, the committee also opted for compromise and gave Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack some flexibility in addressing complaints from school districts regarding the level of whole-grain foods they must include in lunch and breakfast meals.